Speeding up P2 import

[Barry Green]

The fastest way to speed up the import/ingest process is to not do the import/ingest process. Run, don’t walk, to dvfilm.com/raylight/mac and get the trial version of Raylight. It eliminates the need to do any ingesting at all; it lets you edit right off the cards or right off the hard disk where you’ve copied the footage.

[Jesse Gordon]

OK, so you’re a big Raylight fan.

I still need to copy the data off of those cards, so I can record new footage over them … and I REALLY need to backup the hard drives, since they seem prone to failure.

[Barry Green]

Copying is not the same thing as importing and unwrapping/rewrapping though, so let’s separate those out.

What I’m saying is the whole unwrap/rewrap phase can be eliminated completely from your workflow. Any phase of the workflow that used to be spent doing that, just disappears.

As for copying: the fastest you’ll get data off the cards is through a PCD20 using FW800, or through a desktop computer (not a Mac) using a PCI->PCMCIA adapter, or through a laptop going directly through eSata or FW800 to a fast hard disk.

The thing to manage here is your bottleneck; the cards are capable of up to 80 megabytes per second, so you want to identify any element in your chain that’s not up to that speed and change that out. A PCD20 with FW800 is potentially capable of 100 megabytes per second, and a direct PCMCIA bus is capable of 133 megabytes per second, so those are the systems you want to be using to transfer with (i.e., forget USB2 or FW400, those will slow you down). But the biggest bottleneck is in the drive you copy to; most modern hard drives can handle maybe 40 megabytes per second or so, last I checked. So if you’re copying to a regular hard disk, that’s the bottleneck and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it other than to copy to something other than a regular hard disk. Something like a G-RAID should show a notable increase in transfer speed.

Another thing you can do is multiple copies from the card simultaneously. If you need two copies of the footage, don’t wait for it to finish copying to one drive before you start it copying to another, just drag ‘n’ drop to both drives at the same time. I do this all the time (in Windows, at least) and it executes both copies in barely any more time than it takes to copy to just one drive.

[Barry Green]

Okay, looking back on your workflow, here’s what I’d say:

[Jesse G] “Currently the Pansonic AJ-PCD20 is connected to a MacBook Pro, along with a FW drive.”
This is probably slowing you down quite a bit. Don’t share the firewire bus between the PCD20 and the external drive, you’re probably congesting the bandwidth. Get an ExpressCard Firewire 800 adapter and use that to connect to the drive. So use the MBP’s internal firewire bus for the PCD20, and an external FW800 bus (attached through the ExpressCard slot) to the external drive.

Or, alternately, ditch the PCD20 and use the Duel Adapter instead. That way you can plug the P2 card into the Duel Adapter, the Duel Adapter into the ExpressCard slot, and leave the FW bus for the external drives. And get FW800 drives.

[Jesse G] “Step 1) Copy P2 card folders to Drive A

Step 2) Copy P2 card folders from Drive A to Drive B

I’d identify this as a big waste of time. Copy to both drives simultaneously and you should see both copies done in the same amount of time as it used to take to get one copy done.

Step 3) On Drive B, Import/convert to FCP compatible Quicktime files using Final Cut’s import window.”

As already said, you can ditch this step entirely.

If all works out as I outline, you should be able to at least triple your workflow, if not quadruple the speed overall.

[Bob Woodhead]

What Barry sez, but possibly substitute the LaCie 2big RAID 1 external FW800 2 drive array as storage. Mirrored as you copy. 1TB (500GB used as RAID 1) now $400. Warm fuzzy ensues.

[Noah Kadner]

Also strangely enough I sometimes find the transfers go incredibly faster if the lastclip.txt file is copied by itself and then the rest of the P2 card contents dragged over in a separate copy operation.

Noah

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[Barry Green]

[Noah Kadner] ”
Also strangely enough I sometimes find the transfers go incredibly faster if the lastclip.txt file is copied by itself and then the rest of the P2 card contents dragged over in a separate copy operation.”

Well known, documented and proved. Definitely copy the lastclip.txt separately from the CONTENTS folder. Don’t know why this happens in MacOS, but it does; embrace the speed potential you get by copying the lastclip first, then dragging the contents folder separately.

And, yes, excellent suggestion about the RAID 1, that’s another way to get duplicate copies done with no speed penalty.

[Shane Ross]

[Barry Green] “Definitely copy the lastclip.txt separately from the CONTENTS folder.”

This is why P2 Genie is a good investment. It does this automatically.

Yeah, I too think that if you are in need of a speedy turnaround, Raylight is an absolute must. If you are in an ENG scenario, then editing right from the cards or from the initial backup should be fine. But if not, then IMHO, backing up the footage on TWO drives then using one for editing is a must. Either copy to a drive in the field, then copy to a media drive, using the field drive as backup, or using P2 Genie to backup to two drives, then using one right away for editing. Either way…have a backup.

Shane

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[Bob Woodhead]

I’ve been using P2CMS to copy media off cards, as it has a verify function.
1] anyone know if it’s slower/faster to use P2CMS vs standard file copy (with or without the “lastclip” last method… man, that’s weird)
2] how do you verify the copy if not using P2CMS

[Jesse Gordon]

thanks y’all for the incredibly helpful information.